MKTG 345 Week 4 Digging Deeper: Audience

Using Google Analytics to track your websites progress is important because it can show you whether or not you are meeting your goals. Google Analytics has many features, one of the important ones to really understand is the audience feature.

When I say the Audience feature I am talking about the metrics that are displayed by clicking on this, on the left sidebar.

Within Audience there are many other features such as: Overview, Active Users, Lifetime Value, Cohort Analysis, and Audiences. This post will be touching on understanding the Overview section of Audience.

When you first get into the Overview section the first thing that pops up is a line graph that gives an overview of some metric. These are the different things you can have these line graphs show you. Using these are valuable, but one of the most valuable features on Google Analytics>Audience>Overview, is the ability to compare these different metrics. There are two different ways they allow you to compare, and that is either two of these metrics in a, "metric a vs. metric b" style graph, or you can pick one (or two) of the metrics and see how those compare, and add two different time frames to see the differences from one time to another.

This image shows the amount of users, people who visit the site, on a day-to-day basis over the time frame of July 1st, 2017 through October 11th, 2017 (date of writing) in blue, and is comparing it to the users who visited the site July 1st, 2016 through October 11th, 2016. You can pick any two time frames and see the differences, like the current period compared to the prior period is a popular one. But for the sake of this example we are looking at the differences for the same time frame from one year to another. So looking at this is useful, and it is not just about seeing the differences in users, but there was a drop somewhere in September through early October that was not normal in the past. So by comparing these two time frames it is easy to see that this was not normal. 

The next thing you will see on the Audience Overview are some other important metrics and their little line graph, these are other comparisons and other rates and they also show the blue line and the orange line to help compare, essentially it is very similar to the line graph shown above, but has different metrics that create the lines. Next to these little graphs are some more charts, these are New user vs. Returning visitors, this shows two different charts since that is the easiest way to compare the two different time frames.

The next things on the Overview section are Demographics, System, and Mobile. System and mobile are more concerned with compatibility, some browsers may display things slightly different. I think the most important of these are Demographics, which include language, country, city. My biggest concern in this area is language. If the users are viewing the content in different countries that's fine, but if they are viewing the website in a different language it is important to be aware of how the content is translated. If it is not common for other languages then it is not something to be too concerned with. 

So this image shows the different languages that visited the website within the same time frame I have been using for the other examples. The main users are people who are speaking English, but there is a significant amount of diversity within the languages on the website. It's really up to the company, but if there were a lot of people using a certain language, or a certain few languages, it may be valuable to hire someone fluent or familiar in those languages to make sure the translations Google proves are sending the intended message.

There is a lot that can be seen with just the Audience Overview section of Google Analytics. Being familiar with your audience behaviors can help you create content more tailored to the people and activities people are doing on your website.